My 30th Year Series #2: On Turning 30, Having Already Felt It

I’ve always been running towards my next birthday, unable to feel secure with the number I actually hold.

Welcome to my second essay in my new 30th year series. Every month, I’ll be dropping an essay on my journey out of my twenties and into my thirties, looking at beauty pressures, whether I will actually feel more confident (like everyone says) and generally leaning into nostalgia. I don’t want to be hackneyed about turning 30, but whether we like it or not, it is a landmark (especially for women). I hope through this series that I will learn to enjoy this seminal year, to confront the ugly parts of my internalised misogyny that scream ‘It’s ALL over now. You’re a rotting sack of flesh, left on a shelf, with no life prospects left!’.

This will be a free newsletter, each month, but any support is greatly appreciated - as it helps me do this (gestures to the Substack universe).

On Turning 30, Having Already Felt It

Entering a new decade is a big milestone, and 30 especially holds a lot of weight—particularly for women. It feels like a new crossroad. We’re told that this is the time you decide whether or not you want to pursue having children, if you want to commit to certain long-term relationships, and if your career is the career for you.

I have felt all that. I mean, I’m writing a monthly Substack series about it, for Christ's sake. But there’s been another feeling I’ve been grappling with: feeling like, finally, I’ve caught up with my age. This is either something you will innately understand, or you won’t have a clue what I’m on about. Let me explain.

Many of my friends have been freaking out about turning 30 this year. In a group panic, their main gripe is that they don’t feel 30. They feel too young, still 21— they don’t feel like adults.

My experience has been the opposite. I’ve felt 30 for years now. When I was a teenager, I felt like I was in my twenties, and as a child, I felt like a teenager. I’ve always been running towards my next birthday, unable to feel secure with the number I actually hold. Often, I’ve forgotten what age I am because of this.

This, my therapist and I have unpicked, is largely due to parentification. I was treated as older and wiser than my years and, therefore, not only performed that role but became it. I found being childlike and silly hard; I found ‘acting my age’ impossible. I couldn’t wait for adulthood— for the independence and surroundings I already felt would suit me at, say, fourteen. A lot of the time, I was nowhere near as mature as I believed myself to be. But the feeling was real.

In recent years, I’ve tried to tap into my ‘inner child’— a phrase that makes me shudder but is, unfortunately, the only apt description of what I’m trying to do. I wanted to savour some of my twenties, to be a little less put together, a little less type A, a little more youthful, before my thirties, where the majority of us would level out into some sort of shared adulthood. I can’t say I was successful at this; it’s nearly impossible to change decades of conditioning.

Sometimes, this feeling of being older got me in trouble. At fifteen, I decided I wanted to move back to London. I’d been born in Hackney and lived there in my early years, before my family relocated to Norfolk. I was desperate to be a grownup, to live alone. I applied to the BRIT School, initially without telling anyone. I got an interview, then a second, and then — suddenly — I was in my mum’s car driving to Croydon to live as a lodger in a stranger’s home. I was sixteen and felt like the whole world was just one step outside of childhood. My parents were unbelievably supportive, although I really gave them very little choice. I had a plan: fame, fortune, and independence. It did not, of course, go to plan.

Within weeks, I was back home, calling up local colleges and sixth forms, seeing if any still had space for me. I felt twenty and sixteen, but — crucially — I was not. I could cook and clean, look after the basics of myself, and I had ambition in buckets. But I was not prepared for adult situations. The night I decided to leave, to call my parents crying and ask them to come get me, was when I was followed home by two men. I returned to Norfolk, tail between my legs, embarrassed that I’d had a going-away party and been so arrogant to think I was leaving my small town behind for shining lights. It was a reminder that, although I may have felt older, I was still a child, in a child’s body, with a child’s frontal lobe.

During my days at Glamour magazine, people were often shocked upon hearing my age. I was made a director at twenty-six and was one of the youngest people in the building to hold such a role. Many of my colleagues assumed I was in my thirties and, sometimes, I didn’t correct them. Feeling older than my years had, finally, come with some positives.

When I went freelance, my ambitions changed. It no longer really matters what my age is at work. No one is asking anymore, and I’ve aged into my level of experience. I don’t have colleagues to compare myself to.

Thirty, honestly, feels like coming home to myself. Like my skin is finally fitting right. Like the age coming out of my mouth fits the age I feel. I am no longer thirteen going on thirty. I am thirty going on thirty.